A minute after the alert went off the door to his bedroom eased open automatically and his tearful girlfriend stood in the doorway. Christie was a tall, slim seventeen-year-old, both sporty and elegant in appearance. Of the girls in his school she eclipsed all others, and it wasn’t just Jake that thought so. Jealous classmates had bombarded his memory feed with hateful messages for years, unable to understand why someone like Christie would be attracted to someone like him. He wasn’t the smartest kid, or the best sportsman, the richest or even the one with the best body enhancements. Yet she chose Jake. He hadn’t hounded her into the decision like his sexually aggressive classmates. He never doubted his self-worth, but their relationship had done little to boost his popularity. Jealousy can be a unifying catalyst for hatred.
“Come in, babe,” said Jake, beckoning her to enter so the door returned to its dormant position in the wall and gave them some privacy.
“I’ve seen her,” said Christie balancing sadness and anger perfectly.
“Who?”
“Sam Goldberg.”
“Oh.”
“How could you?!”
“In what way is any of this my fault?”
“You must have secretly desired someone else the whole time we’ve been dating. Deep within your Memory Cloud you’ve been fantasising about tall, leggy blondes with blue eyes and foreign accents.”
“But you have long legs, blonde hair and blue eyes…”
“I’m not Swedish, though, am I?” she snapped. “Have you been lying to me?”
“No, I swear. Look, none of this makes sense. You know how much I love you, but you also know how this is meant to work. The letter would never have had your name in it because you’re not eighteen for months. Right now, I just need your support and to spend our last day together having fun rather than a massive argument.”
Christie’s anger crumbled and she slumped into his arms on the bed.
“I’m sorry. This is really hard for me, too,” she said.
“I know,” he said softly.
“I’m just so scared to be that far away from you. I accessed your cloud and saw all the details of your letter. It’s a tragedy what they’ve done. It must be a mistake.”
“I wish it was, but I don’t believe so. I think it’s very purposeful. The Circuit want to protect themselves by separating those that threaten their perfect system. Arseholes.”
A klaxon sounded and a large virtual warning sign lit up the room in a deep red flashing box. It had a simple message written inside.
VIOLATION.
“Careful,” whispered Christie. “They are always listening.”
There were strict rules that governed people’s behaviour towards the Circuit. Crimes against the Circuit included minor defamation, like Jake’s comment, to what they deemed serious acts of treachery. Treachery was punished severely, although no one knew how exactly because it was so rare. Minor violations were tallied annually and any adult reaching ten was punished. Normally this took the form of a temporary reduction in their importance factor. Violations by children were always counted on both of its parents’ tallies. Tyra didn’t have any. This one was Jake’s ninth of the year.
Tomorrow his tally would start afresh.
“Come on, let’s go down to the beach,” said Christie. “I want to sit with you by the sea and watch the sun go down one last time.”
“I’d like that.”
She placed her smooth hand in his and lifted him off the bed with ease. Jake was no weakling. Slightly taller than Christie, but by no more than the length of a fingernail, he had a slender frame more suited to fast swimming than wrestling or boxing. He regularly exercised, partly to maintain his own personal standards and just slightly to ensure he was in good shape for her.
They snuck quietly down the escalator to avoid further questions from the family before slipping out of the side door where they might escape the inquisition from Jake’s guides. With guides it was never that easy.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Brother Job suspiciously, watching as the young couple crept around the corner of the house and onto the road.
“To enjoy the calm before the storm,” explained Jake.
“There’s a storm coming!” screamed Dinah nervously before jumping, quite pointlessly, into a bush.
“It’s a metaphor,” replied Jake.
“They’re really dangerous,” added Dinah.
“What, metaphors!?”
“No, memory storms.”
“I don’t think hiding under a bush will protect a hologram from either.”
“It might.”
“I guess you must be talking to your guides,” said Christie who was unable to see any evidence of the holograms, even though he’d granted her full permission to his Memory Cloud. It didn’t work the other way around. The guides couldn’t physically see Christie, but they saw her cloud perfectly well. It had the effect of painting her into their virtual scenery.
“Yes, he is,” snapped Job. “And who might you be?”
“This is my girlfriend,” said Jake.
“Not for much longer.”
“Tell me if I’m wrong,” said Jake through gritted teeth. “but your influence over me starts tomorrow, right?”
“Correct,” answered Brother Job.
“Then get lost.”
“We can’t,” added Dinah whose head was peeking out of the bush like a gopher from a prairie hole.
“Why not?”
“We’re a constant in your feed from the moment you touched the letter. A permanent stream in your virtual conscience. You can’t just swipe us away.”
“But you don’t have to be up close to me, do you?”
“No, we can be anywhere we like as long as we can still see you directly or via a local Memory Cloud.”
“Fine. I’m putting a metaphysical restraining order on both of you until midnight. You’ll stay as far away from me as you possibly can, got it?”
“Received and understood,” grunted Job.
Hand in hand, Christie and Jake strolled across the road and squeezed down a side path and into the heart of the carbon rod farm.
“Quick, they’re leaving,” begged Dinah, shaking up and down nervously like she desperately needed the toilet.
“Stand down, Sister Dinah. There’s nothing we can do about it today.”
“I know but they’re going to the beach. I wanted to build sandcastles!”
“How’s that going to work? You don’t have hands.”
“I can still pretend, can’t I?”
“Fine, we’ll go down there. But tomorrow you need to take things a bit more seriously.”
Dinah nodded and crossed her fingers behind her back. The guides drifted after the two young lovers a few hundred metres behind with Jake always in their sights.
Jake and Christie dodged in and out of the carbon rods like they used to when they were little. It had been an ideal place to play and the farm had been in the neighbourhood as long as they had. The tall, slender cylinders were small in comparison to some he’d seen, but they all had the same purpose. Regulating the atmosphere. When deforestation hit its peak in the early twenty-thirties and the world’s temperature soared, there weren’t enough trees on the planet to recycle the carbon dioxide back into oxygen. That’s when the world’s boffins came up with the solution – synthetic trees.